Question
The CEO of your firm has heard from several of his peers in town that major new quality initiatives almost always require some kind of culture change.Discuss how a company’s culture can affect its quality performance from both a positive and negative manner.
Sample paper
Organizational Culture and Quality Performance
The company’s culture may have positive or negative impacts on quality performance depending on the nature of the culture. A strong organizational culture is key in ensuring success. A positive organizational culture may serve as a motivation aspect for employees. Employees who have high motivation levels are more likely to produce work of high quality and in an effective manner. The organizational culture can improve quality performance by encouraging innovativeness among employees. Some organizations have positive cultures that encourage employees to develop solutions to various organizational challenges. In such organizations, employees are likely to drive innovation as they develop unique solutions to various organizational challenges. A positive culture improves how employees perform their jobs in terms of quality and speed. As such, a strong culture may lead to less mistakes among employees when performing their tasks. An example is whereby the organization gives employees the employees a higher degree of freedom to make their own decisions. In such organizations, the employee is likely to react immediately to new problems rather than going through the management.
A negative culture can detrimentally affect an organization’s quality performance. Culture has a strong influence in the way the organization develops its products and how it provides services to its customers. In addition, the organizational culture significantly shapes employee behavior including how they interact with customers. If the organizational culture is negative, there will be a consequent negative impact on quality performance as well. The top leadership plays a critical role in shaping the overall organizational culture. If the top leadership sets a bad precedence, the employees will likely follow suit. This has a negative impact of quality performance. An example of this is in the manufacturing sector. While the major goal during manufacturing is to ensure the production of quality products, the quality control manager may opt to increase the speed of production at the expense of quality tolerance levels. This may encourage slack among employees leading to production of a large number of low quality products.
